1. Technical Field
The present description relates generally to on-line communities and, more particularly, but not exclusively, to reconciling agent generated opinions in on-line communities.
2. Related Art
The availability of powerful tools for developing and distributing Internet content has led to an increase in information, products, and services offered through the Internet, as well as a dramatic growth in the number and types of consumers using the Internet. With this increased consumer traffic, the number of community driven systems provided through the Internet, such as rating systems, collaborative information resources and databases, or other information resources, has also grown dramatically.
On-line collaborative communities and rating systems, such as Yahoo! Answers, Yahoo! Movies, Wikipedia, and other information resources may receive, process, and/or publish agent generated opinions and other generated information about topics and predicates of interest. Systems that aggregate agent generated opinions associated with a common predicate may provide useful and convenient information to users.
However, the collaborative communities, rating systems, and other community driven systems must often aggregate differing, conflicting, and/or ambiguous opinions. In addition, some ratings systems may be susceptible to tampering, or may be skewed by user bias. The differences, conflicts, and/or ambiguities should be reconciled to provide a more reliable aggregate of opinion generation parameters. The reconciliation of the opinions should also account for biases in agents and the potential for tampering.